Unofficial news and tips about Google

February 14, 2015

Download Blocked Gmail Attachments

I was checking some old Gmail messages and I noticed this warning: "Anti-virus warning - 1 attachment contains a virus or blocked file. Downloading this attachment is disabled." It turns out that the .rar archive was "blocked for security reasons" and I can't download it.

There are some file types that are blocked by Gmail, but .rar is not one of them. Here's the list: ".ade, .adp, .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .exe, .hta, .ins, .isp, .jse, .lib, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msp, .mst, .pif, .scr, .sct, .shb, .sys, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh". It turns out that the archive included a few .bat files inside a .zip archive and "Gmail won't accept these file types even if they're sent in a zipped format".

Anti-virus warning in Gmail's web interface

How to download the blocked attachment? I couldn't find a way to do this from the web interface. Gmail disabled the download button and the "save to Drive" button. Not even the "basic HTML" Gmail interface lets you download the file and the "download all" link only lets you download all safe attachments.

Fortunately, you can use other mail clients: Outlook, Thunderbird, KMail, Apple Mail. Surprisingly, Gmail's Android app lets you download blocked files or save them to Google Drive. Gmail's iOS app doesn't let you download blocked attachments, but you can save them to Google Drive. I also checked the built-in mail clients from iOS and Mac OS X and it's easy to download all attachments. To open archives in iOS, install an app like iZip first.

Hi Paul. Scary stuff from Google. Ended up having to save the original and open in Thunderbird email app. Then was able to retrieve. Guess time to move on from Gmail as Google made a fundamental change which almost cost me a lot of lost time.

Very simple steps , thanks for providing this ,as this will provide us solution How to deal with Gmail instantly ,I was also strugglinf for the same to send high resolution images to my friends yahoo mails ,because everytime I suppose to do so I find attachements did n't receive to another person .but why this happens ,I searched a lot for the solution and got solution from here https://gonetech.net/gmail-technical-support-phone-number/

Thank you very much. It was a great help. I don't know why they let me attached zip file with .sas files and send it to myself, and after that they do not allow me to download or send it anywhere or upload to Google Drive. Especially upload to Google Drive solution should be available in gmail web client.

You have provided an nice article, Thank you very much for this one. And i hope this will be useful for many people.. and i am waiting for your next post keep on updating these kinds of knowledgeable things...Fitness SMSSalon SMSInvestor Relation SMS

Workaround that worked for me:1. Click on the arrow next to the reply button and choose "show original"2. Click on the link "Download original"3. Open the downloaded text file4. Copy the block of code below the line: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="yourfilename.js"5. Use an online base64 decoder: https://www.base64decode.org/6. Paste your copied block of code and click decode, it will download your js. Also tested with zip files.